Friday, July 20, 2007

wayang!

About a week ago, I was having a lunch break with a worker from the water treatment plant. We talked and talked, and suddenly subject about wayang came out. As it turned out he was big fan of wayang kulit ( puppet show in Indonesia ).
" Do they had wayang in Bali ?" he asked
" Yes we have wayang in Bali "
" Is it the same as here ? "
" well, hard to tell if it's the same , the characters and stories maybe similar but there were lot of differences too "
I never watched wayang in Java, but I loved them when I was a child in Bali. I found few things quite different here ..
1. In Bali people watched wayang merely watching its shadows, the master of puppets himself never showed .
2. Javanese wayang has skinny stick figures, and the main characters could speak common language. In Bali the main characters spoke in Sanskrit and because few people understood it, it had to be translated by the side characters.
3. Javanese wayang has a group of singer called sinden, and had longer dialogue and teaching. In Bali wayang mainly focused in war, less talk and more violence ! I just luv the war scene, especially when the story about Bratayudha you could expect all night war scene.
4. Because of the use of shadows, Balinese wayang could perform " special effect", the arrow could multiply!, the characters could grow or shrink, or use magical spells .
But now less and less people are watching wayang, maybe because of modern type of entertainment had rendered it obsolete. I tried to draw it but I thought the drawing were really bad, sorry.

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